MCAD and PLM markets are maturing and a PLM market that continues to miss the hopeful expectations of the industry pundits. There have not been significant advances in MCAD since the late 1980’s. The game changing technology of ‘feature based solid modeling’ has become a commodity as all of the players have caught up over the past decade. For a variety of reasons the PLM market has underperformed. Although the theory of product lifecycle management is sound, realizing the vision has eluded many companies, taken far longer, cost much more than expected, and failed to deliver as promised.

According to Azzolino, “One of the reasons for this is the inherent disconnect between the goals and objectives of the product-centric engineering constituents and a company’s financially based business objectives. There is no better example of this disconnect than the stark difference between the language of engineering and the language of business. MCAD and PLM have historically focused on the engineering and design aspects of product delivery. The language of engineering as spoken by MCAD and PLM is based on physical attributes of the product and technological capabilities of the software solutions used.”

The language of the business is time and money. It is no secret that the profit motive is what drives critical company decisions. It is also no secret that much of a product’s ability to achieve the expected financial goals is driven by design and manufacturing decisions that occur very early in and continually throughout the product delivery process. The holy grail of ‘collaboration’ is meaningless if the parties are not speaking a common language. The ‘lingua franca’ that translates the language of engineering into the language of business is ‘cost’, specifically, product cost.

Extending beyond the design engineering value, accurate product cost estimates offload the estimating burden from manufacturing engineers and planners already challenged with demanding production schedules, decreasing capital investment, and a dwindling experience base. In addition, predictive cost assessments offer procurement and sourcing professionals a much needed “should cost” from which to make better, more efficient sourcing decisions while negotiating from a fact-based position. Finally, program and project management benefit from real time visibility to product cost information continually throughout the product development and delivery process thus avoiding the sudden shock of bad news late in the process.

The result, product cost knowledge, is the common language spoken across the enterprise and is clearly focused on the business goals (as opposed to parochial product or feature oriented goals) that reduce costs, increase margins and contribution, drive profits and support growth.